ARTS Ancient Landscapes/Pastoral Visions
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath
Though William Blake wrote of “England’s green and pleasant land”, a landscape artist is the last thing you might call him. But a late and very small-scale set of landscapes by Blake, dated 1819, sparked an explosion in the imaginations of a group of his young artist friends. They were inspired by Blake to take up landscape in a form that wove itself like a silver thread into 19th- and 20th-century British culture. This is English neo-pastoral – an idea in literature, music and the visual arts that has tended to surface in times of post-traumatic national stress, and which is the subject of this stimulating show.
In Blake’s time, the stress was caused by the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Blake had turned 60 when, commissioned through his friend, the painter John Linnell, to illustrate a child’s edition of Virgil, he completed 17 narrative wood-engravings, each about the size of a cigarette paper. These show pastoral scenes not very different in sentiment from Thomas Gray’s 1751 poem “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard” – cattle, weary farmworkers trudging home, the setting sun. But in their manner these vignettes were very singular indeed.
